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A Post-Conservative
Right?
Nicholas Kristof chides the Bush administration for its liberal idealism: "Mr. Bush and his aides, like Bobby Kennedy, dream things that never were and say why not." And he finds it ironic that the right is adopting such idealism just as the left is growing out of it. But this isn't ironic; it makes perfect sense. The word "conservative" only appeared after the French Revolution, when politics so threatened the status quo and proposed such drastic and sweeping change that it made sense for a political movement to focus on "conserving" what people already had. Conservatives could focus on warding off threats to their institutions, traditions, and the status quo state of affairs generally. Modern American conservatism arose in response to such threats from 1960s radicalism and the global communism of the Cold War era. Yet today, politics is marked by a remarkable consensus -- no one serious wants to overthrow liberal democracy or religious tolerance or market economics -- such that there are no such dangers of revolutionary change. As leftist dreams of fundamental, sweeping social reform have faded from mainstream politics (and this can only be described as a victory of conservatism, and a defeat of one species of liberalism), there has been less and less a role for "conservatism" as it's commonly known. The right has naturally moved from defending current institutions and cautioning against untested political action to imagining its own vision of the future. It doesn't make much sense to conceive of American politics in terms of liberal vs. conservative, for in what sense can a political party with such a revolutionary program of reform for the Middle East and such faith in the use of American power to promote positive change really be called "conservative"? Conservatism has receded because its triumph was so complete; the right has moved on to the next step of standing athwart history, yelling "Go this way." And so Mr. Kristof perceives Bush and his team for what they are: right-progressives. Not exactly Bobby Kennedy, but the same sort of animal.
Post-Cons
My comrade Ross Douthat doesn’t like what I have to say about the contemporary right, insisting that he’s “not ready to sign up” for an idealistic or progressive right-wing movement “just yet.” But I wasn’t proposing a new shift so much as observing the current state of things. It’s become cliché that all the interesting ideas in public life today come from the right, and that leftist thought is stultified and stale, listlessly casting about in search of a new agenda. Even the anti-war protesters do not propose any radical alternative to prevailing beliefs; they want to preserve a Cold War-style system of deterrence. It’s true, as Ross notes, that conservatism stands for “a rejection of…history-shaping schemes.” Other ideologies have some element of radicalism; they seek to transform regnant institutions in accordance with some abstract ideal. Conservatism, on the other hand, opposes such adventures in the cause of defending the institutions under assault. Conservatism is the opposite of radicalism and, as Samuel Huntington has written, “it denotes an attitude toward institutions rather than a belief in any particular ideals. Conservatism and radicalism derive from orientations toward the process of change rather than toward the purpose and direction of change.” It follows, of course, that when there’s no radical challenge to existing institutions, there’s no role for conservatism to play, for how can one base a political movement on a rejection of history-shaping schemes when such schemes are relegated to the fringe? You can’t spend your time protecting current institutions from abolition when no relevant faction wants to abolish them. (We’re talking about domestic politics here.) The left that’s relevant isn’t radical, and the left that’s radical isn’t relevant. No one serious in American politics wants to overturn the American system. Sure, if some radical eugenics movement emerges, a conservative movement would focus on the defense of human nature. (And I’ve written about conservatives and human nature.) But it’s not here, and the right has moved beyond fending off radical ideas to developing its own. |
